ClipGrab – A Free multi-platform YouTube Downloader and Converter

There are many applications out there to download videos from popular websites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and MetaCafe etc. Also, some popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera have some add-ons to download the videos from those sites. But one common problem is most applications and add-ons doesn’t have any option to convert the videos to any other formats while downloading. You can download the video first, and then convert it using another software. Not any more. Meet ClipGrab, a multi-platform and friendly YouTube downloader and converter.

ClipGrab can download videos of any format on the web and covert them to another format at the same time while downloading the videos. It allows you to download multiple videos at the same. Just copy the video URL and paste it in the ClipGrab interface and start downloading them instantly. It can download videos from popular media websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe, Dailymotion and many other sites.

Here is list of other supported sites:

youku.com

myspass.de

myvideo.de

clipfish.de

It will not just download videos from the above sites, but also from thousands of websites using its advanced video recognition technology. Forget about any video download software or browser extensions. ClipGrab is all you need to get this job done. The latest version of ClipGrab has built-in search option, so that you can search and download videos of your choice from YouTube without having to visit the YouTube website.

It can able to download videos of various formats such as MPEG4, Mp3, WMV, OGG Vorbis, OGG Theora, FLV or WebM. Also you can download videos in qualities such as 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p and 240p etc. ClipGrab will work on most modern operating systems, including Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OSX. It is completely free, open source, and is released under GPLv3.

Install ClipGrab

In Arch Linux:

ClipGrab is available in Arch Linux default repositories. You can install it using command:

sudo pacman -S clipgrab

In Ubuntu/Debian:

ClipGrab has a official PPA. To install ClipGrab in Ubuntu/Debian and derivatives, add the PPA and install it as shown below.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:clipgrab-team/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install clipgrab

Install from Source:

If your distribution has no installation file, just download it source file and compile and install it as shown below.

First, download the ClipGrab source file from the official website(The website link is given at the end of the article) using command:

wget https://download.clipgrab.org/clipgrab-3.6.1.bz2

Extract the file using command:

bzip2 -d clipgrab-3.6.1.bz2

Make it executable using command:

sudo chmod +x clipgrab-3.6.1

Then, launch it using command:

sudo ./clipgrab-3.6.1

Download videos using ClipGrab

Once installed, Launch clipGrab. The default interface of ClipGrab will look like below.

ClipGrab default interface

As you can see in the above screenshot, ClipGrab has four tabs.

Search – You can search the Youtube videos without having to YouTube webiste.

Downloads – This is where we put the video link and download it.

Settings – In this section, We can change the download location, enter proxy settings if you have any, and add metadata etc.

About – Displays the ClipGrab details

Let us search and download a video. To do so, click on the Search tab from the main interface and hit enter.

Search videos in ClipGrab

Once you entered the search term, ClipGrab will automatically shows the video list from YouTube. Just click on the video you want to download.

Convert videos

As you can see in the above screenshot, I have selected mp3 format from the “Format” drop down box. So, ClipGrab will only download the mp3 version of the video.

I have been using it for a long time, and I have downloaded videos and convert them into another formats from many media sites. As far as I have tested ClipGrab, It is worked pretty well. Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.

1 Response

This is awesome! Great find. But it seems it cannot download HD YouTube. For somesone who want to download 4k or 1080p videos, I’d recommend Acethinker Video Downloader, It is a free cloud based software to download videos without installing anything in your device.